Ashley Hackshaw, Author at Ashley Hackshaw / Lil Blue Boo

Vintage Inspired Farm Sign Ornaments

November 8, 2016 by Ashley Hackshaw

Another ornament reveal! I love these vintage inspired farm sign ornaments using Michaels pre-distressed painted wood ornaments:

These were so easy to make using a simple template that I’ve included at the bottom of the post as a free download:

Vintage signs and farm animals. I’m so predictable….you know I included chickens!

Vintage-inspired farm sign ornaments would make great gifts too:

I used these pre-painted distressed wood ornaments from Michaels for my project:

I printed off my template and traced each image onto a wood ornament using transfer paper:

Next I used a small brush to fill in my images:

I replaced the brown strain with red raffia for a different look:

All the finished ornaments ready for hanging on the tree!

These would make great year-round decor too don’t you think?

I love all things vintage, especially if they are farm related:

Can’t find the same ornaments? Just find anything similar in size!

You can download the template I used by clicking right here or clicking the image below! A big thanks to my friend Stephanie Corfee who made these printable! Happy painting!

I love to make all my ornaments every year! It’s such a fun challenge to start from scratch, it’s my favorite part of the creative process. You can find everything I’ve made so far here at this link and the big reveal will be on the 14th!

Faux Cross Stitch Hoop Ornaments

November 3, 2016 by Ashley Hackshaw

Here’s another reveal of one of the ornaments I made for this year’s dream tree: Faux Cross Stitch Hoop Ornaments!

I do love to embroider but it would have taken ten times as long to make these ornaments if I’d actually cross stitched them! Don’t these look embroidered?

They are so easy and can be made by any age:

Here are the supplies you’ll need to make your own:

Irish Linen. You can find it in the embroidery section at Michaels and it has an instant vintage feel.

3″ Embroidery Hoops.

Red Ultra Fine Point Sharpie Marker.

The first step is to stretch the linen onto the embroidery hoop. I didn’t get a photo of that but it’s so easy! You just lay the fabric on the bottom hoop and then slip the top hoop into place. Tug at the sides of the fabric until it’s nice and tight.

The next step is to start “stitching” away! I just did these designs freehand so they would look a little more primitive but basically you just draw a little “X” for each stitch. You can look up cross stitch designs to get some ideas but you can also just go for it:

Note: There’s a cross stitch font called Home Sweet Home that you can download and use as a guide if you need some “x” help!

Here’s I’ve written the word “HOME” using little x’s and it looks just like cross stitch:

My letters aren’t even straight and it still looks lovely! It looks like it was hand sewn because of the imperfections:

When you are done with your design make sure your hoop is tight so the fabric won’t slip off when the back is trimmed. I usually add a little bit of craft glue around the back edges of the hoop and let it dry before cutting off the excess fabric:

I used a hot glue gun to attach a small bow to the front and just hung the ornament by a string to the tree:

I love how they all turned out:

I can’t wait for you to see them all on the finished tree!

These would be great for gift tags too:

The Chicken Kiddie Table

November 2, 2016 by Ashley Hackshaw

There has been so much drama in the chicken coop recently. For a few weeks the baby chicks have been sleeping in the coops nesting boxes, which was fine for a while but they leave a mess behind and as a result the laying chickens don’t want to lay their eggs in there anymore.

To fix all of this, and to gently nudge the baby chicks to the adult roosting bars, I decided last week that I was going to block the nesting boxes at bedtime. At dusk that first night, the baby chicks marched into coop to put themselves to bed and you would have thought they’d walked through a portal into another world. They peeped and paced and panicked….until one finally decided to try and walk up the ramp to the adult roosting bars. I watched on as Popcorn, one of our Mottled Cochins, made her way up to the bar. Then another chick followed her lead and everything seemed to be going okay until the adult chickens started to come in for bedtime. The big chickens one by one began chasing the baby chicks off the roost and out the coop door.

To quiet everyone down I finally decided to just build another roosting bar on the other side of the coop for the babies. I grabbed a 2×4 and attached it to the wall across from the old roosts. I put the baby chicks on the new roost but they eventually fell off one by one and then they couldn’t figure how to get back up again. And so again they peeped and paced and panicked. I borrowed the big chickens ladder and after guiding them up the ladder a dozen times after they fell they finally they figured it out. Phew. Here are the babies finally nestled on their bar and figuring it all out. Their sweet little trill is the sound they make as young chicks when they are saying goodnight. It means they are settling down so that’s a good sign. I was able to leave them for the night and not worry so much.

A video posted by Ashley Hackshaw (@lilblueboo) on Oct 25, 2016 at 4:13pm PDT

When I went to check on them the next night they had all remembered how to climb the ramp but one of the adult chickens had decided to join them: FoShizzle. I don’t think Foshizzle joined them on purpose though. With her huge feathery plume she can’t see the bars above her and so each night Fo just finds the ramp and follows it up to her perch. Eventually she must have realized that she’d climbed up to a different perch, the kiddie table. She seemed kind of annoyed that she ended up with all the babies:

Fo did hunker down right away and was trying to fall asleep while the babies crawled all over her trying to find a spot they liked on the bar. She’s a very patient chicken! I’m convinced that Foshizzle is just a kid at heart. Boo put Foshizzle on her handlebars this weekend and rode her around the yard a few times. Fo loved it:

I need my own Charlotte to spin a web with the words “SOME CHICKEN” because Fo is just that special.

The baby chicks (Popcorn, Palmer, Dolly and Twinkle) are getting so big. The Mottle Cochins look like they are wearing layers and layers of petticoats:

I love that not one of their feathers are the same:

And the Silkies look like they are part unicorn! (Not only do they have gray-blue feet and an extra toe, they also have cute little powder blue ears too that they won’t let me get a picture of.)

The Silkies are so fluffy. I never knew why until I started examining their feathers. In the photo below a regular chicken feather is on the left. The regular feather has little barbs on the strands that interlock and keep the strands connected together in kind of an orderly fashion. A Silkie feather is on the right. It lacks barbs and the strands just fly everywhere!

P.S. I would love to get a streaming live cam set up in the coop, especially at night….that can be shared on the blog. If anyone knows an efficient, inexpensive way to set something like that up I’d love some help! I’m just not much of a techie in that area and it seems like it might blow right through my chicken budget.